Chair of Public Commissioning - Evolving client-contractor relations

Increasing public value by redesigning traditional collaborative structures in construction.

In the past 20 years many integrated collaborative structures have been developed in construction (Eriksson, 2010; Hartmann & Bresnen, 2011). These agreements vary from performance-based contracts until Design and Build, Engineering and Construct or DBFMO contracts, but also include alliances, supply chain collaboration, strategic partnerships and co-creation (Walker & Lloyd-Walker, 2015). Many of these initiatives originate from the need to increase public value by involving private partners.

Collaborative structures often develop by exploration, evaluation, and evolution of experienced practitioners in (public) organisations that participate in the construction process. Because of the innovative and complex character of this public infrastructure (road, bridges, canals, railway) and social infrastructure (museums, governmental offices, prisons etc), these structures are often considered as interesting study objects for academics, resulting in a treasure of scientific insights (Bektas, 2013; Bosch-Rekveldt, 2011; Gehner, 2008; Lenferink, Tillema, & Arts, 2013). Hence, it appears that many of these scientific recommendations and learning experiences are hardly exploited and implemented in practice (van de Ven & Johnson, 2006).

In this research, we aim at strengthening future collaborative structures for clients and contractors in the construction industry by making use of existing knowledge and expertise. The research will be based on mixed methods, since we intend to use existing dataset from project management and knowledge management databases, in addition to document analysis and additional interviews. As such we build on previous research approaches such as Verweij, van Meerkerk, and Korthagen (2015) and Hoezen, Voordijk, and Dewulf (2011) but broaden its scope by comparing different kinds of infrastructures commissioned by different types of clients. An international comparison also belongs to the opportunities.

The empirical findings will be the input for valorisation workshops with strategic partners in our network such as the Dutch Government Building Agency, Highways Agencies in the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands, Municipalities and Water boards. The final aim of the project is to design a toolbox for collaborative agreements between partners in the future network society of the construction industry.